Week 4 Adaptive immune system

Here is a presentation I did at the ARUK Early Career Researcher conference on the advantages of having an online presence as a scientist. More info to come soon! Download the presentation by clicking here – Don’t be a faceless researcher

There is growing evidence for the role inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease progression. Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have found that variants of genes involved in regulating innate immune function confer a greater risk in developing Alzheimer’s disease(1 & 2). Examples include loss/reduction of function mutations in the anti-inflammatory/phagocytosis TREM-2 gene (3); variants of promotor regions […]

My lab in Manchester has just released a fascinating research paper that touches on the lovely scientific elements of serendipity, hypothesis falsification and surprise results. This paper has continued the great scientific tradition of generating more questions than answers. Have you ever wondered how does your body knows when it’s damaged? After your sprain your […]

What is the point of having a blog if you are not going to engage in off-the-cuff speculation. So here goes- Every one of our genes is under constant threat of mutation from radiation, free radicals and merely being mis-copied during replication (just to name a few). So it stands to reason that genes that […]

An article was published in 2006 called Why most published research findings are false(1). I have skim read it a few times, but recently I put the time in to read it thoroughly. It basically goes through a simple statistical analysis to suggest that even if all of research was performed using the absolute best scientific practices […]

Here is an interesting study that suggests your average diet contains both anti-cancer and cancer causing compounds and the effect sizes cancel out. For example bacon increases your risk of cancer and onion decreases your risk. So eat bacon and onions and you’ll be perfectly healthy.http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2012/11/27/ajcn.112.047142.abstract I was thinking about this paper and here’s the twist. Because […]

Introduction Anyone who watches the news frequently might be aware of a very wide and deep fissure that exists in science today. They will be aware of this fissure because every week it appears that a disease is cured by a new compound. This compound might one week be found on the skin of a […]